Shades of Porphyria
by HeartsandEyesDelight
Summary: A GSR version of Browning's poem "Porphyria's Lover". It doesn't have a happy ending. Read with that in mind... : "The smiling rosy little head,/So glad it has its utmost will,/That all it scorn'd at once is fled,/And I, its love, am gain'd instead!"


Disclaimer: I don't own.

A/N: Fair warning, this is dark. Like, really dark. Have you read Robert Browning's "Porphyria's Lover"? Because if not, go read it, and then tell me if you want to see it played out in GSR-land. :)

Oh, and porphyria means purple. That's necessary knowledge, for the reading of this.

Also, it's JellybeanChiChi's fault.

Enjoy! (Or don't... It might just make you sad and alarmed.) And review? :) Pretty peas?

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Shades of Porphyria

It was raining. It seemed like it was always raining. I know, the _rain_forest… it was named for a reason. I get it. But the constant, unending sound of heavy droplets sliding from the soaring canopy all the way down to the canvas top of our little tent...Well, it can get to you. I've always suffered from insomnia—always. I remember being six and waking up to a myriad of things.

My mother had discovered that my brother had a girl in his room—it was only ten o'clock, but he'd gone to bed… My dad was out at the bar down the street. She was angry, and she told the girl she needed to go home, but she never would have told my dad about it. She didn't hear him come in while she was yelling at Alex… but he heard her. My brother went to the hospital that night. _He'd been riding his dirt bike in the dark, hit a pothole, and flew off, over the handlebars._

The nurse looked between my mother, looking frightened, my father, still slightly intoxicated, and me—wide eyes betraying the truth. "Did you see your brother get his owies, sweetheart?" I shook my head slowly. I hadn't seen anything. "…How did you find out he got hurt?" She asked again, my mother tensing underneath me.

_I heard my daddy screaming, and the bangs._ "I heard it. It was right outside my window. His friends ran to the door." I was six, but I wasn't stupid—if I told on Daddy, we'd all be dead before they could help us. You had to tell on grown-ups when they weren't around.

Or the more common but still scary nights when my mother was the sole victim. My daddy came home from the bar, and he pulled out a glass that still had specks of food in it. He dragged my mommy out of bed and made her rewash every dish… after he gave her all the owies. She wore sunglasses a lot, and turtle necks… even though it was summertime. Mommy wouldn't let me dunk Oreos in my milk anymore—the crumbs stuck to the bottom. She was afraid.

I feel guilty for this now, but the night that cinched it was the night he came after me. I had been late for supper—something Daddy got very mad about—and I'd put my bike away messily. I heard it fall over as I was running into the house, but from the sounds coming through the open screen door, the game was still on, so Daddy wouldn't know I was late. But if I ran back out, he would know. …There was every chance in the world that if I got out to the garage first, tomorrow morning, he would never know. I ran into the house, washed my hands for dinner, and fell asleep thinking of nothing but waking up early and fixing the bike.

He must have gone out to work in his workshop, or on his old car, or to drink after the bar cut him off… I don't know—I just know that I woke up with him above me, and everything was dark. When they took me to the hospital, I wouldn't talk to the nurses. I was afraid, and it was all I could do not to cry. Daddy got madder if you cried. This nurse was suspicious too. She asked my brother what had happened instead. …Six year olds didn't ride dirt bikes at midnight. He looked at his dirty sneakers and squeezed my hand. "Sara sleepwalks. We used to keep a baby gate in her doorway, but she hasn't done it for months… we thought she'd grown out of it. She walked out of her room and fell down the stairs."

"…These seem like strange bruises just for some stairs."

"...There were lots of toys at the bottom. That's where her playroom is. We found her in a pile, crying, still asleep."

The nurse pursed her lips, and shook her head, but we went home with Daddy that night.

So I reasoned that if I didn't sleep, I couldn't be woken up by horrible things. Sure, bad things happened when I was awake too… but the worst ones always seemed to come when I was sleeping. So I stopped sleeping.

I know now, as an adult, that I really didn't stop sleeping. You die before you can go two weeks. So I must have fallen asleep, and not remembered it, because for a long time I believed that I just wasn't sleeping anymore. And for a little while, only small bad things happened. Nobody went to the hospital, my mommy didn't get pulled anywhere by her hair… the sunglasses only came out every once and a while. In my six year old world, that was as close to paradise as I thought things could get. Because I thought everyone's family yelled, and fought… and I thought every lady with sunglasses was hiding what my mommy was hiding. It was the way everybody lived, but nobody talked about it. It was a secret that everybody knew, like Santa Claus not being real. So if things had gotten better, well… we were just a step above the rest, weren't we?

The next time I remember waking up, my mommy was screaming. Wailing. I knew it had been my fault, because I hadn't slept in so many months and now that I had, something had happened. I didn't know what, but it was bad. My mommy never sounded like that, even when things were really bad. I was afraid to get out of bed, but then I heard Alex rushing out of his room, down the stairs… so I let my feet slide to the floor too, feeling the mushy carpet between my toes and tugging impatiently on the old nightgown that I was too tall for, but still not wide enough for. It had been washed so many times that the soft cotton felt scratchy, but if I pulled the front collar down, the scratchiness was on my chest instead of my neck, so it didn't bother me so much.

I moved down the stairs after Alex as fast as I could, while still being quiet, in case I needed to run. I smelled something funny as soon as I reached the bottom of the stairs. It made my nose tickle, and it made me afraid to go forward, but my brother and my mother were talking in the kitchen. My daddy wasn't, and usually he did all the talking. It made me curious, so I moved to the doorway. My daddy was on the floor, and there was blood everywhere, and my mommy was shaking, the big knife she used on holidays still in her hand, covered in my daddy's blood. I wanted to throw up, and I couldn't. I wanted to cry, but I didn't. I stared.

Alex glanced at me. "Sara, go back up to your room." He turned away from me, taking the knife from my mommy's shaking fingers. "Mom, listen. …Mom, look at me." His voice was stern—he almost sounded like daddy when he talked that way. She obeyed him the way she obeyed daddy. Her eyes snapped to his, and the shaking slowed. "We clean everything… bleach the kitchen, and wrap him in garbage bags, put him in the trunk. Bring blankets, put Sara in the back seat, call our schools and tell them we're sick. We drive as far away as we can, dump him in a river or… bury him in the mountains, away from the trails. The animals will eat him, and tomorrow, we'll file a missing person's report. My friend Joe taught me how to change speedometers back… We get rid of the body, mom, and we go on with our lives."

I didn't go back to my room, I just stared. My daddy was dead. My daddy was dead and we were going to bury him and not tell anyone. My daddy was dead, and I felt sick and sad and so very relieved. But my mommy didn't listen to Alex the way she listened to daddy. She would look at him when he used that voice, but she wouldn't put daddy in a garbage bag in the trunk. She shook her head, numbly, and walked over to the kitchen phone, dialing 911 and leaving bloody fingerprints over the keys.

Even after daddy was gone, I believed that staying awake was what had made the bad things get better. And I'd lost my whole family because I'd fallen asleep. …And even when I was old enough to realize how foolish that was, the pattern was established. As I got older, it was easier to tell if I had slept or not… so I slept less. And now, thirty-one years later, in the middle of the jungle, I sat awake.

It was so much darker, in the rainforest, than it had been in Vegas. Even when you slept at night, instead of during the day, the lights of the strip were like a second sun, sneaking beneath your eyelids, stealing precious moments of REM and reminding you endlessly of every crime that had and that was and that would be committed under the halogen glow of excess that was sin city. But at least you got used to the noise. The sound of toilets flushing in the apartments above you and music playing through your bedroom wall and the unmistakable sounds of sex through your kitchen wall. The traffic outside was a dull hum, like a lullaby, and everything else was white noise.

But the rain—the rain didn't lull you and you never got used to it. Even if you were no longer in a sleeping bag on the floor of the tent that never failed to leak, no matter what you did to avoid such a thing. Even if you had managed to finagle two camp beds instead, because everyone in camp was excited that the long lost love you'd left behind had left his life behind to come after you. Even if you should be exhausted by the lovemaking that had exhausted the gray-haired entomologist storing softly beside you and that had really, been rather earth-shattering. Even when the heat and the smell and the pure electricity of the activity still lingered, tangible in the air, hovering like fog.

Maybe, subconsciously, I still believed that bad things would happen if I fell asleep. I mean, rationally, I knew better. I did. But on a purely irrational level… I should be cuddled up to the man who had appeared just hours previous from amidst a jungle of doubt, with eyes only for me—not even paying the fascinating bugs around us more than a glance the entire night—sweaty and sated and sleeping soundly. It was just that damn rain, pitter-pattering into eternity, bringing down with it all of the doubt from the leaves above. My quirky scientist might have stepped through the uncertainty, but he couldn't erase it—it was in the air and the trees around the camp where I'd been alone for so long, and the rain was only brining it closer, hammering the roof with questions.

He'd retired. He'd sold the townhouse. He'd paid to have the sitter keep Hank for up to a year. He'd had everything put into storage, boarded a plane with a tiny knapsack, a handheld GPS, and a passport. The rain could not wash away the facts.

…But his actions couldn't wash away my fears, either. I had left Vegas in turmoil. I had been kidnapped, drugged, placed under a car in the desert and left to die—whether by rain or simple exposure or by being eaten alive by wildlife. And Gil had been amazing. He'd spent every waking moment in the hospital, he'd urged me not to return to work so quickly, he'd be gentle and kind and caring. But when I couldn't sleep, in Vegas, the light—whether sun or strip—too overwhelming… I would watch him sleep, peacefully. He had been frightened, when Natalie took me… but she didn't haunt him now.

They had caught her. They had arrested her. She was never, ever going to hurt us again. The case was solved, justice served, my bruises fading. He said he was sorry he had ever let it happen… and he blamed himself, yes, but… he thought it was over. He didn't realize that Natalie was just another demon swooping inside me. He didn't know that while he lay in bed, snoring softly, and I sat up against the headboard, watching the shadows play over the walls, ghosts sat in among us. The room was filled with them, but he slept soundly, because he couldn't see them.

He didn't see my mother, shaking fist around the staple of every family occasion, beside his bedside table. He didn't see my father, sitting on the edge of our bed, flipping channels on the dark TV and drinking deeply, bleeding deeply from his darker chest. He didn't see my brother, in the closet, rustling garbage bags and planning our way out of the life that descended upon us. He didn't see my physics teacher from Harvard who raped me, causing me to transfer to Berkeley despite my aversion to living so close to Tomales Bay, standing beside me, his eyes lascivious and his grin taunting, because he knew I'd never told the man with whom I'd shared everything else. I'd never told anyone. And he especially didn't see Natalie, lingering in front of the full length mirrors, her face only visible in her reflection. And she was singing. She was always, always singing.

The room was crowded, my head was spinning, and on he slept, unaware.

So how could I trust that his presence here meant the end of doubt? The end of loneliness? When I'd gone back for Warrick's funeral, I'd asked him to come with me. Even if it was only for a little while. I had asked as much a thousand other times, of course, but we were at an impasse. I had left him, and Vegas, and our life behind. He was not ready to leave. I was not ready to return. Why should he chase me if he wasn't ready to go—hadn't I done exactly what I needed and only thought of my own needs? He would do the same. …It had taken losing one of our own to make me break down, return to the bedroom full of ghosts and the man who would not chase me.

I hadn't run away to hurt him. I had fought to stay, for as long as I could. I had left to keep from falling apart. …And even knowing that it was unfair to expect it, I wanted to be worth chasing. I had fought for him, enduring the specters, while he slept soundly. I wanted him to fight for me, even if it meant sacrifice. And yet, more than a year passed… he let me walk away twice… told me I needed to end the relationship for him, because he was like Tom Adler, waiting on a relationship that was dead, unable to walk away from my lifeless form.

Maybe it would have been better for all of us if I'd died in the desert, beneath the car.

But I had survived, and I had given him up when he asked me to, and yet without warning he appeared from nothingness… from ferns and insects and uncertainty, and expected the doubt to evaporate in the heat of the day. I had given myself to him, that night, because when had I not been completely willing to give him anything he asked of me—anything he even thought of asking, whether he voiced the desire or not?

But it wasn't enough. He said he wanted to stay, and he said that he loved me, and he said that we would stay together, forever now. We had left all of that behind us, but we hadn't. The doubts were in the trees, absorbed from the thousand tears I had shed here, and the rain was bringing them down, down, down among us once again, into our lungs and into our skin and into our minds. He would leave, again, or I would, again, and then we'd both be alone again.

The desperateness with which he'd loved me, tonight, belied his fear. He didn't want to be alone anymore either. But I knew us—we had a history, and history repeats itself. Human nature doesn't change, and fear dictates actions far more strongly than love does. This was temporary, even if neither of us intended it to be. Even if both of us fought, this time, eventually it would slip away.

I turned to him, once again sleeping through my concerns. The rain was endless and his snoring was the soft, contented sound of unconcern. I was the one who saw our downfall looming, and so I was the one who must act to stop it. It would do no good to stop my own running—he wouldn't know what to do when he woke up, realizing I was unable to go. He would despair, without realizing the good I had done for us. No—the sacrifice would have to be his. I was certain he would understand, eventually… he would be happier—we both would—this way.

I pulled the light blanket off his sweaty form. He was still naked from our lovemaking, and I delighted in the beauty of his form. Soft, vulnerable toes and feet… strong ankles, muscled calves, thick, powerful thighs. His fingers splayed across them, wide and nimble, his nails even and clean. His palms were gentle, fingertips calloused, arms shapely and strong and a perfect fit around me. His shoulders were broad, his back smooth, his chest flat, his stomach just soft enough to make the god seem like a human. Like a man I could deserve. I straddled his thighs in the most natural position for us. Man and woman, bodies in parallel, his penis soft beneath me, though I knew it would take no effort at all to connect us.

Of course, that would be fleeting, once I took the steps to keep us together forever. But this was the only way to banish the doubts the rain was throwing down upon us, cutting through us like acid on the marble face of a statue in a park. This was the only way. I looked to his face—the halo of curls, a little long, a little messy—the closed eyelids that I knew hid the brightest, most beautifully blue eyes I had ever known, the round cheeks covered in soft whiskers, the linear nose and cleft chin… the strength of his jaw, the soft surprise of his lips. Oh, god, his lips. I kissed them, deeply, knowing that this might be the greatest sacrifice. To stay together, forever, I would give us this intimacy—the way he responded to me, unconditionally, even in sleep.

And he did—I felt it against my lips and between my thighs and I didn't have to back away and open my eyes to see that he was still deeply asleep, though the smile on his lips told me I was in his dreams, right now. How very, very perfect.

I reached between us, oh so gently, and caressed him, watching the moan slip from his open mouth shamelessly, feeling him harden and lengthen beneath me, all his masculine power held in my palm. I was so overcome with the rightness of the moment—of my decision—that I couldn't wait… could not do anything to ease the connection for myself. I pushed myself onto him, hissing at the pain as he was enveloped inside me entirely, and watching his eyes flicker open in confusion even as he groaned in pleasure. Ah, and there were those eyes… so beautiful, shining with trust. The rain brought no doubt with it now—it brought vindication.

But I knew, first hand, from my struggle in the desert… survival is mindless. It's instinctual… evolutionary. Even if he understood… he would fight me, and I was so much smaller. I reached to the floor, wincing at the continued discomfort of our union as he smiled lazily at me… sleepily. God, but he was beautiful. And he was mine. He was mine and I was his and I would do anything to keep it that way. When I sat back up, I held clothing that had been discarded earlier in the night. Socks. Not as romantic as a tie or a scarf, but it would do. I tied his wrists tightly to the bar of the camp bed over his head, and he grinned, stretching beneath me and allowing me to tighten them, to be certain he could not escape.

He even playfully tugged on them, assuring me that I could do whatever I wanted to him. I kissed him, and I moved against him, feeling the union ease with friction, my pain subsiding in pleasure at the unity of the moment and the rightness of my actions. How perfect, how beautiful, that we should enter our forever in this way. He wanted to hold back… begged me to slow down, to come with him, but I didn't need the explosion—the connection was enough. He screamed my name as completion gripped him and I lifted the pillow from my side of our makeshift bed, breathing in deeply as he panted beneath me, eyes closed.

"I love you so much, Gil. Forever."

His eyelids fluttered, but did not open. "Forever." He repeated, and I lowered the pillow to his face.

He hardly struggled. Certainly, he did, but he must have sensed the rightness of my actions—the beauty in his sacrifice. He stilled, and I waited a moment to remove the pillow, just to be certain. His chest was still. I placed two fingers to his throat—nothing. I smiled, lying my body down against him, reveling in how we had remained joined through the entirety of the act. We had met forever together.

I gazed into his deep blue eyes, wide open. There was the beginning of petechiae in the whites. Red and blue… almost purple. How beautiful. I sighed happily, kissed his lips once more, and laid my cheek to his chest, closing my eyes.

And sleep finally, finally came.


End file.
